Tag Archives: women

In 2014, I attended a weekend workshop in Oregon, called the Fishtrap Winter Gathering. The theme was “Learning from Women,” and it was a weekend of talks, readings, and workshops by Molly Gloss, Ursula Le Guin, and Tony Vogt. It was a marvelous experience that changed my thinking in many ways, and I have never described it to my satisfaction. I did make one post to the Aqueduct Press blog, “Report from the Fishtrap Winter Workshop.”

First up was a discussion of the definition of women. Throughout the workshop, it was awkward to talk about “women” as a whole, because of gender essentialism. We did it anyway. There was an acknowledgment that the definition is shaky and incomplete, and a general invitation to men to take on the honorary name of “women” for the duration of the workshop, but that by and large, across cultures, women have been socialized to take on certain roles and certain ways of being.

There is a cultural division, and in it, the role of “men” is privileged. Ways of thinking, being, doing. An assumption that women will be liberated when we take on those roles. But why not the other way around?

At the moment I’m thinking about all these things in the context of the left. The group I’ve been working with got an influx of new members (hooray!) that is mostly men, and thinking, “Oh, this again” with a certain sense of exhaustion. It’s not the big things but the little things, like do you put smiley faces in your emails or not, when you should ask nicely or express gratitude. In mostly women’s spaces, we do all these things, and we do them to build community. In mixed or mostly men’s spaces, it comes across looking like weakness.

How does a group handle interruptions? Men often interrupt more and get more air time. If you want to change it, do you ask women to interrupt more, or men to interrupt less? Is there a social benefit to taking turns?

Spent last weekend at the wonderful and thought-provoking Potlatch convention (http://www.potlatch-sf.org/). It’s a con for readers of speculative fiction, and I’ve been going to it for years and years.

Instead of a “Guest of Honor”, Potlatch has a “Book of Honor”. This year’s book was the anthology Women Destroy Science Fiction, produced by Lightspeed Press. It’s a response to the all-too-frequent claim by men that women writers are DESTROYING science fiction! Ever since H.G. Wells wrote the first sci fi book! (Actually, though, he wasn’t the first. That honor goes to a woman, the author of Frankenstein.)

The book is great! Where else can you read stories about dystopias where everyone lives in a mall? Genetic and cybernetic modifications that turn people into mermaids and spaceships? Or watch a corpse decompose in a spaceship after the artificial gravity system disappears? Who can resist an essay titled “How to Engineer a Self-Rescuing Princess”?

It was also wonderful to be able to have conversations about the book, in the form of audience-participation panels, and outside the panels — in the halls, in the hospitality suite, in restaurants, and afterward in blogs.

The conversations, though, seemed to lack focus. We’re in the middle of change — women are respected science fiction authors in some contexts, but not in others — and I don’t know that anybody was able to come up with a clear and coherent vision about the exact nature of the problem or how to handle it. So it seemed like we were talking about all different kinds of problems. And we were. Some people were talking about respect, some people were talking about the disproportionate publishing and reviewing of men’s work, and some people expanded the conversation to include the difficulty of publishing in general.

for writers, using alternate publishing resources such as Book View Cafe, Indiegogo, and Kickstarter

This particular conversation, though, didn’t make it into the panel. Nor did a conversation about how far we have come, or maybe more important, what we are aiming for. We want women’s genre writing to be heard, but by whom? Is our goal equal representation in the Big Five publishing houses, and if so, why? Is it just women’s writing we want, or do we care about race, class, ability, gender, and more? Do we need a Combahee River Collective Statement for genre writings?

Well, this explains why the conversations seemed to lack focus. They’re tackling a big topic. Why not make it just a little bigger by introducing publishing problems faced by men and women alike? Here you go:

That panel, which drew its inspiration on a speech Ursula Le Guin gave at the National Book Awards about authors, publishers, capitalism, and freedom. However, many of the audience members (including myself) hadn’t seen it, and the conversation dissolved into a conversation about big publishers and Amazon.

Where to next?

I left Potlatch mulling over a couple different concepts, so here they are, in their preliminary form.

1) It’s about building power. The question of who is published and reviewed, and who isn’t, has a little to do with quality and a whole lot to do with power. A group of people working together to read, edit, publish, and review each others’ works will build power.

2) Is it about competing with money, trying to get into the top publishers? I don’t think so. Money is a form of power. A noxious one. It’s a form of power best countered by striving for freedom. Whatever that means. Again, Ursula Le Guin’s speech is worth watching.

3) Is this a problem best solved by the individual, or the community? Is it about what the individual wants to read, or write, or edit, or publish, or about what our communities need to hear and say and dream?

4) Speaking of community, Potlatch itself is a community-building con. It’s a place for readers and authors to meet each other and support each other. Over the years, it’s exposed me to a diverse range of authors, and it certainly has supported me as a woman author. Part of the solution, that.

5) Do women destroy science fiction? No. Science fiction is indestructible. Here — bring me some rockets and robots and TNT, and I’ll show you what I mean.